1554

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give us strength to body and soul. This natural beauty-hunger is displayed in poor folk's window-gardens made up of a few geranium slips in broken cups, as well as in the costly lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks...Nevertheless, like everything else worth while, however sacred and precious and well-guarded, they have been subject to attack, mostly by despoiled gain-seekers, mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to supervisors, lumbermen, cattlemen, farmers, eagerly trying to make everything dollarable, often thinly disguised in smiling philanthropy, calling pocket-filling plunder "Utilization of beneficient natural resources, that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation grow great." Thus long ago a lot of enterprising merchants made part of the Jerusalem temple into a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves. -John Muir